the personal blog of a newly-fledged biomedical informatician, about anatomy, computers, life, or just anything she finds interesting that day

Monday, October 20, 2008

Frank's pin

(this is another one of those "do not adjust your screen" blurry photos. I am having a bear [ha!] of a time photographing the jewelry I make. I probably should take a class in photographing jewelry, as I've seen some nice examples over at Etsy...)

So I promised Frank a long time ago I would make him a pin, and for his birthday last month, I made good on that promise--sort of. You see, the project was originally envisioned to be a bear outlined in copper wire, looking something like this, from the Bear Taxon Advisory Workgroup site:

But, as with so many of my projects, the problem turned out to be scale--it was a lot easier to sculpt copper wire at the original size than at the roughly 1/4th-size that would be more appropriate for a pin. So, under those selective pressures, the bear evolved into a neuron, which now sits on my bookcase, and Frank was still pin-less.

Emma was encouraging that, even if it didn't fit the original vision, Frank would treasure a homemade gift from me, so I made a couple of tactical revisions in order to get it done in time for his birthday. Because he's such a cat-lover, it seemed like it would be ok to swap the ursine theme for a feline one, and when I saw this big leopard face at Ben Franklin, it was so appealing that I decided ready-made, in place of home-sculpted, would be ok.

I went with yellow and black beads to reinforce the "leopard" theme, and this is the finished product, although it didn't photograph well:

It looks focused in the viewfinder, but then the flash on the beads or something else unfocuses it--I'm not sure what the problem is.

I'm happy with the pin, in a kind of Grandma Moses naive way, but I want to drive my style to end up ultimately in a different place. I don't think this will be representative of my future work.

Frank loved his homemade birthday pin, but I still want to try to carry out the original vision one of these days as well.